Swimming Up: A Health Officer's Journey of Dignity, Defiance, and Hope

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Catalina Santorini

Lisa Peacock did not set out to become a public health lightning rod. She set out to keep people healthy in a corner of northern Michigan where she had spent nearly three decades learning the rhythms of her community and the trust of the people in it. What happened to her during the COVID-19 pandemic, the threats, the political pressure, the Board of Health members who withdrew support while the hostility from the public mounted, is not an abstract story about institutional failure. It is a very specific account of what happens when public health becomes a battlefield and the people doing the work are left standing in the open without cover.

Swimming Up is the memoir she wrote after resigning her position in 2022, and it carries the particular clarity that comes from someone who has had time to sit with an experience and understand it fully before putting it on the page. Peacock is not angry in the way that produces blunt, one-note accounts. She is something more useful: honest. The dignity in the title is hard-earned. The defiance is quiet and principled. The hope is present because she looked for it deliberately, even when the evidence for it was thin.

What makes the book significant beyond its personal narrative is the systemic portrait it paints of public health infrastructure under extreme stress. Peacock navigated the intersection of science, politics, community trust, and personal safety in ways that most people watching from the outside never saw. She shows what that navigation actually cost, in relationships, in health, in the career she had built carefully over decades.

Her voice is warm and grounded, shaped by nearly thirty years of clinical and administrative work that gave her both the vocabulary for what she witnessed and the human context to make it matter beyond policy debate.

For anyone who wants to understand what the pandemic cost the people who worked hardest to contain it, this book is the most personal and most honest account currently available.